Last week, I finally summoned up the courage to tell my father that I’m bisexual.

For a lifelong Catholic, he took it pretty well. He made sure to tell me that he still loved me, and that having feelings for someone of the same sex wasn’t wrong.

It was my actions, he said, that mattered.

Sure, it’s okay to have these feelings – you can’t control feelings – but to act on them would be what constituted a sin. He asked if I’d had sexual partners other than my husband – to which my response was “No,” but honestly should have been “That’s none of your damn business.” He said that he was only worried because if I went outside the bonds of my marriage, that would be a violation of my vows to my husband. I told him that was for me and my husband to decide, and I’d…

This is Part 2, and it deals with some of the cultural teachings I absorbed or was actively taught that harmed me. Part 1 is here but it carries a content note for descriptions of sexual assault.

The first teaching regarded the fate of your “heart” if you had sex before marriage. I was specifically told that if/when you had sex, you gave a part of your heart away which you could never get back. You were broken if you had sex (outside of marriage) and you were a sinner if you “fornicated”. That word that confused the hell out of me for years. Listed alongside adultery, theft and murder in the New Testament as things you should never ever do, none of the adults I asked would ever give me a straight answer as to what it even was, like the “no heavy petting” sign at the swimming pool. Eventually I figured it must be all the sexy things that weren’t Capital-S Sex. Continue reading →

This post is further to a post from a while back about a dream about church. I’d had some songs by Delirious? rattling round my brain for weeks so I decided to listen to the tracks again and see what that did for me. It had the anticipated effect of removing those songs from my brain but it had some un-anticipated effects as well. This is a personal post about how Christianity fucked up my sexuality and is part one of two.

It describes various sexual assults and victim blaming thoughts. Content Note for everything after the cut. Please take care of yourself.

In listening to those songs and recalling how I felt when I listened to them as teen, and in paying actual attention to the lyrics, subtext and implications, feelings were aroused. Anger mainly. Fury and Rage. Pain and Regret. And finally, Heartbreak. Sorrow for my teenage self and disgust for the adults who had care of said teenager. Continue reading →

1/ That I don’t associate myself with the words queer and pan, and haven’t encountered much of those communities at all and thus haven’t seen the hatred against the term bisexual from that angle.

2/ That I’ve not exclusively attributed the meaning “falling for both men and women exclusively”, where men and women are assumed to be cis, to the term bisexual. My knowledge of trans* issues, while far from perfect and complete, ’cause yes, I’ve fucked up around this before, has grown alongside my feminism and my bisexual identity. So I see no reason why the label bisexual would exclude falling for a trans* or genderqueer person, assuming the person concerned has recognised and begun to deal with their transphobia.

3/ Regarding the phrase “I don’t see gender” – yes it’s highly obnoxious. Aoife compares it to saying “I don’t see race”. That’s a phrase I’ve only ever seen used online but from the context I assume it’s really common state-side from people that think they’re being progressive. I’ve read it instinctively as “I *refuse* to acknowledge that I certainly carry racist ideas and stereotypes in my head and act accordingly”. You don’t get to exist in our (UK/USA/White European-derived) societies without carrying racist stereotypes and ideas. It makes me uncomfortable every time I realise I’ve just run into another racist stereotype in my mind, but there it is. You don’t make it go away by pretending it’s not happening. Instead, you note it and challenge it and do your best to act as if you thought otherwise. I also strongly encourage reading about subconscious stereotypes and stereotype threat – learning about these things opened my eyes.

3.2/

“the idea that physical attraction is somehow less valid than, or exclusive of, attraction to someone as a person is the height of sex-shaming. There is nothing shallow or meaningless about being physically attracted to people. And being physically attracted to someone doesn’t mean for a second that you can’t fancy the hell out of their brains as well.”

Well, the internet tells me it’s BiVisibility Day. I feel like I should be excited but I’m not. I’m not out to many of the people in my life, and I certainly can’t post about it on FB, sooo, this will have to do.

I reckon I’m not at all visible as a bisexual person. I don’t dress stereotypically queer and I’m not involved in any offline LGBT communities. I’m probably reasonably out as an “ally” in that I post quite a lot of things about LGBT rights on FB and am often quite vocal in conversation when people decide queer-bashing is ok, but whether most people put two and two together, I don’t know. Continue reading →

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts recently, I’ve been marathoning Grey’s Anatomy. I’m up to season 8 and what I want to know is what the hell are the residents and attendings using for Birth Control?! Without naming names, two women got accidentally pregnant, and while one decided to keep their baby, the other aborted their foetus.The show’s handling it well and there’s no judgement about their respective choices so far, but what I want to know is why! They’re both doctors and they are highly intelligent women at the top of their games, so why are they messing around with condoms? (I am assuming the characters are too smart to risk bare-backing! Good god, I hope not. The circumstances of their situations are never discussed, which seems like a missed opportunity.)

Yes, always with the condoms to prevent STIs, but if you’re in a long term relationship and you know you don’t want kids, why are you not backing it up with hormones? And if you’re not using hormones because the side-effects are not worth it (something I do understand), surely you’d be taking extra special care with the aforementioned condoms? If you thought it had torn, or you “forgot” in the moment, why didn’t you get prophylactic Plan B as soon as you realised? I don’t even. Continue reading →